Category Archives: misc

and so the strange summer — now it’s hot! now it’s not! — eddies to a close. inbetween breastfeeding sessions on the couch, there were a few big city excursions over the school holidays: a bookmaking workshop at the library; an afternoon of getting tangled in ribbon at the forecourt of the arts centre; a few hours with the upside down sea jellies at the aquarium… however it did seem like we spent a lot of time at the mall, and not just for cupcakes.

(but look at it! the drumstick, from cupcake central — a rather splendiferous concoction of chocolate-filled vanilla cake topped with an immense swirl of frosting, a drizzle of chocolate and butterscotch, chopped peanuts, and a wafer. much less messy than an ice cream on the train home.)

no, melbourne central, we found, contained a secret oasis in the middle of the hot, bustley city. we’d been to the parents’ room at myer a couple of times; it was nice and all — wall decals, comfy though inefficiently arranged seating — but it was always crowded with queues for the two nappy-changing stations, and for some strange reason, all toilets but one were kept locked. we’d been to the one in david jones all of once. you’d think it would be fancy, but in fact it was a rather depressing, drab, beige room. with perfunctory chairs, wedged into a corner, surrounded by a bank of reeking nappy bins.

so the melbourne central parents’ retreat was a bit of a revelation. yes, more than just a room. it’s a spacious haven divided into zones:

a nappy-changing area, with a sink with boiling water tap and microwave for food preparation.

a lounge area with cosy (spinning!) chairs.

roomy curtained cubicles in blue, green and red for privacy — each one containing a stylish and comfortable armchair, adorable table, and an abridged and woefully (un)subedited version of little red riding hood as wallpaper.

a little nook with booth seating where you can bring in your food from the nearby dining hall (my pick is the impossibly tasty brown rice sushi rolls filled with spicy salmon, or spinach and sesame).

…and yes, climbing racks, amongst other play equipment.

the kid was most impressed with the little peepholes and cubbies, for quiet time…

and the amazing suspended ropes for rambunctious swinging fun.

there are gates to keep small people contained, and an automatic air freshener dispenses a puff of inoffensive fragrance every now and then. a cleaner comes through often. yes, harlan will grow up happy here… the weather of late is conducive to sushi and cupcakes, and i think i might like a browse at the gap.

it was my birthday a couple of weeks ago, except now that i write this, i see that it was actually five weeks ago, gah.

my olds were in town, as were the boy’s, and an aunt of his, and a cousin, and we thought we might wander into carlton for a catch up and celebratory luncheon. pizza and gelato were on the horizon (essentially, a replay of the kid’s birthday do some weeks back, but without the paint), but i knew that we would never get into D.O.C. at peak lunch hour. so we tried the aunt-recommended place, and when that proved to be a heaving mass of lunch crowd, we crossed the road to the place previously vetted by the boy’s parents: cafe trevi.

what it had going for it was that it was empty. where it fell short — way, waaayyy short — was the food. the boy and i shared a couple of pizzas, and they were so awful we couldn’t bring ourselves to finish them (and you know, just for perspective, on the occasions that i’ve had say, domino’s, i eat until it’s gone). the bases were sturdy, bland dough trays on which some nasty plastic cheese was melted, and toppings — some strips of leather masquerading as prosciutto for instance — artfully arranged. the others seemed to be enjoying their food, so perhaps we just ordered the wrong things.

however, everybody agreed that the mixed salads were dismal: some roughly chopped pallid iceberg, a couple slices of cucumber and a wedge or two of anaemic tomato, carrot sticks, and — here’s the kicker — dressing perched precariously atop the lot in disposable plastic tubs, one of balsamic vinegar and another of commercial salad cream. low fat mayonnaise, even.

i must say i took a perverse pleasure in dipping carrot sticks in the salad cream. maybe i even enjoyed it, far more than i did the pizza anyway.

dessert down the street at casa del gelato almost made up for it. but not really, i was so grumpy.

last sunday, the boy proposed a carlton excursion, which began with an expedition through the melbourne cemetery. i love a good cemetery: that old one in the middle of athens, where the boy and i wandered 11 years ago; paris’s pere la chaise, in which my sister and i became lost, and cold, and hungry one wintery afternoon in 2007; waverly cemetery in sydney, the site of a fine twilight picnic overlooking a chinatown cream cake and the crashing waves of the tasman sea… good times!

melbourne general cemetery is a world class cemetery. the internet tells me it was established in the 1850s, and that it houses around half a million. what i can tell you is that it is a wonderful collection of gilded script in slabs of marble…

it’s a place where all the branches of christiandom exist peacefully…

there is a chinese section,

and a jewish section.

many angels, some beheaded.

it was shortly after we discovered the amazing shrine to elvis presley — a grotto covered in succulents and engraved marble plaques that looked like velvet elvis paintings — that we realised we were hungry. we meandered through the historic gravestones…

…to the exit, and found ourselves on lygon street just before three. and then after some discussion, we found ourselves at D.O.C. negotiating pizza.

sadly, the special from the other time — porchetta with mustard fruit — wasn’t on the menu, however there was a most agreeable offering of parma ham with buffalo mozzarella, fresh figs and a pungent undercurrent of gorgonzola. we were similarly smitten by the porcini pizza, which included a melange of mushrooms, all cooked to perfect succulence on a white base. the kid had her own margherita, because some things are just too delicious for her. case in point: unsatisfied even with this plainest pizza on the menu, she removed every basil leaf before it was deemed acceptable. by the end, we were so satiated we couldn’t even manage gelato. still, it was the birthday pizza luncheon that was meant to be.

four months ago, i got an email of just two sentences: “…just been diagnosed to have possibly lung cancer with metastases to the spine. i feel so bad we did not take her back pain seriously, attributing it to the hard physical housework she’s been doing.”

during the week just past, an update: “…sadly not responding to her treatment. yesterday’s scans show that the cancer has spread to her brain, liver and more bones, and fluid has collected around her heart and in her lung. she remains brave and is taking whatever comes.”

at what point does living with cancer tip over into dying from it? i am not convinced it is all just a state of mind.

i didn’t fritter our weekend away eating fried potatoes, no. to the kid’s chargrin, i spent rather a lot of time in this sturdy little brick of a building just around the corner from the chiltern chip shop. contrary to what you may gather from the looks of it, it is not a historic gaol.

in fact, it is a historic printery, the home of the federal standard, a newspaper founded way back in 1859. these days it lies dormant most of the time, as it has since the paper closed in 1969 following the death of its publisher. however on the second weekend of each month the wooden door swings open, and the old machines within clank to life.

under the auspices of the national trust, a pair of personable old gentlemen trained in the ancient, ink-stained art of printing will invite you in, and tell you that everything is more or less how it was when the presses stopped running all those decades ago.

and it’s true: here and there, surrounding two 100+ year old printing presses, quaint tools hang on rusty nails

and vintage office chairs rest tiredly on threadbare carpet.

there are ancient fliers attached to the wooden walls,

or tucked into forgotten secret spots,

stacks of yellowed newsprint

sitting on stacks of shallow drawers.

lots of drawers bearing mysterious marks,

divided up into many tidy little compartments

holding a wealth of precious metal –

printing blocks in the tiniest of sizes, all neatly organised.

there are larger blocks as well, artfully carved of wood in fancy typefaces, for setting handsome headlines.

and there are trays of etched metal panels, each a work of art advertising the fine products of yesteryear.

look! it’s the new holden!

the pride of the printery though, is what its guardians consider to be the last working linotype machine in australia.

the big city newspapers used to have scores of them, i was told, but the advent of phototypesetting and computers saw these machines unceremoniously thrown out.

this typesetting machine is itself adorned with type — instructional and stern

and heartbreakingly, gorgeously industrial.

and yet, the keyboard is unashamedly no-nonsense, not a hint is given as to the magic that will ensue once each key is pressed.

metal tabs are released from a large cartridge (“magazine”) above the keyboard, each one bearing a corresponding character.

once a complete line has been composed, set to a fixed width, the row of letters forms a mould into which molten lead is pressed. yes, that thar’s a cauldron of molten lead:

it cools down fast, solidifies, and is ejected.

voila. a line o’ type.

unglaze your eyes. i’m sorry to go all fangirl on you, but at this point a great metal arm swoops down, retrieves the metal tags, and then — following some turning of gears and a good deal of clicking and whirring — returns each little key to its rightful slot in the magazine. it is amazing to watch, but perhaps not quite as rivetting to read a rambling retelling of.

i have memories going back thirty years, of being in the upstairs sunroom of uncle rowan’s potts point flat, overlooking the majesty of elizabeth bay. when i say “flat”, i really mean palatial early 20th century apartment with lofty ceilings and windows to match, the window panes made of the kind of glass you don’t see anymore: spotted with little air bubbles and perfect imperfections. there was a formal bedroom, meticulously curated though never used, and a formal sitting room with big puffy couches and a shrine (not creepy: life-sized oil-painted portrait and fresh flowers) to a dear and long-ago departed wife.

there was a library with tidy — labelled — shelves. throughout my childhood, he presented me with compendiums of children’s verse, or volumes of australian literature populated with muddleheaded wombats or plump bush babies. i have them, still. there was an old piano. there was the kitchen, which until more recently than you might imagine, housed one of those old fridges whose door handle operates a latch that holds the door shut. there was the time, when i visited with my aunt, and she discovered a block of coon that had met its end in the pantry cupboard. it had turned a most unearthly shade of brackish blackish green, but rowan insisted that it was fine and refused to allow her to chuck it out.

there was the formal dining room, where over a few years, the meals served became subtly though increasingly rancid, so that eventually my mother firmly insisted that we would be taking rowan out for luncheon or dinner, and returning for tea and coffee after.

tea and coffee was always taken in the sunroom — a complete service, with an assortment of little dishes and cups. there was no television, in that room, or any other, and we sat surrounded by sunlight, books and papers, and the assorted tchotchkes of a lifetime of travel. in lesser hands it might have all been a big kitsch overload, but at rowan’s it was a fascinating trove of treasures.

what happens when you’ve been away for a while, say six months or so with a lapse in regular communications, is that you might be nattering away on an interstate skype with your aunt, and she will mention in passing that she’d been to the westfield food court in the city on the way to rowan’s funeral. a month ago. the email your cousin sent with the news was apparently lost in the ether.

rowan. the last time i saw him was at lunch in october last year, at sopra across the road, when it seemed like he had mostly forgotten who i was, or at best, thought that i may have been my sister. he was 97, after all. had lived through the war as a surgeon in the navy, and then through a series of unfortunate events in more recent years that progressed from driving the wrong way down one-way streets to falling off a seaside cliff, and stepping through a rotted bathroom floor and spending the long night with a leg poking through a hole in the downstairs neighbour’s ceiling. he was tough: he was one of those old folk who took a regular ocean swim in the wintertime.

much of his life he spent training and bequeathing scholarships to younger doctors from far-flung dusty lands. a lesser-known but no less significant legacy is the appreciation i now have of a well-considered afternoon tea served on mismatched china. thank you, uncle rowan. i raise my pinkie in a farewell salute.

it is nice to see that there is order in other parts of my world. my immediate surrounds are teetering piles of papers and magazines, some destined for new homes, some headed for the great recycling bin in the sky, some — the tiniest little scraps, really — are somehow imbued with great sentimental value, and languish in the purgatory of my lounge room rug, waiting…

but the ceremonial red folding chairs were arranged just so last wednesday in the rather lovely leichhardt town hall, and the leichhardt celebrity brass band were resplendent in bright yellow, as i, amongst sixty others with interesting — if not purely long and challenging — names, became citizens of australia. yes, i have only been here since 1989, but here, as the mayor said, is where my migrant journey ends.

it was a jolly ceremony, with pop classics up front, and advance australia fair coming up the end, with friendly words, a pledge of allegiance and a gift of a baby tree in-between. the mayor, in his ceremonial, fur-lined robes, was proud to boast the live band — bugles! trombones!! — accompanying the national anthem, the made-in-australia flags which were handed out to all inductees, and the lamingtons in the back of the hall for the post-ceremonial reception.

and what lamingtons! first of all, they were huge. secondly, there were moist, with a good coating of rich chocolate and coconut. thirdly, there were enough that i managed to have three of them.

yes. the third one was actually surrendered by the kid a few bites in after she realised that she only liked the idea of having a second lamington. immediately upon handing it over, she started making eyes at the last remaining custardy fruit tart on the table. at this point, i steered her towards the door…

and on to dinner. what better way to celebrate becoming an aussie than to stuff oneself with italian food? the most mediocre of italian food, even. we were privileged to have ms d as witness to the naturalisation, and pleased to dine together at a laminate table in the balmy courtyard out the back of bar italia.

i have not been to dinner at bar italia for the longest time. some years ago, i ordered off the non-pasta dinner menu, and the size of the piece of broccoli which accompanied the meat stuck in my head for evermore.

when the food arrived, i was overwhelmed by the wonderful aroma of cake. i thought it was a nearby flat white, but once i started eating my veal marsala, it became clear that the sweet smell was coming from my plate. it was an enormous serve of soft meat in brown gravy — just as i remembered, and look at that broccoli! — but what had escaped my memory, and perhaps the dish has changed over the years, was that the sauce was so sweet that the meat seemed to be coated in caramel syrup. i thought the kid might like it, but she was quite repulsed. i expect it was the confusion of candied meat.

(but where was the problem? she likes candy, she likes meat, she likes bakkwa…)

we had a garden salad (dressed with the finest — not! — bottled dressing, ah memories of youthful folly) and a large bowl of chips (very nicely cooked, but so aggressively salted in parts that it hurt to eat them), and after it was all gone, we sought to right the wrongs (so wrong they were right, kind of) by eating copious amounts of gelati.

it’s insane how much gelati they can scoop into a flimsy plastic cup at bar italia. i was slow in naming my flavours so much of the cup was filled with an almost savoury, full-of-nutty-bits pistachio. the counter boy made up for it by piling the bounty gelato into a large cloud above the rim of the cup.

it was very moreish, unfortunately, packed with shredded coconut and a number of dark chocolate shards. unfortunate, because after the meat and veg, and salad and chips, and yes, the three lamingtons, i could eat no more.

here’s one for the album: eating my first lamington as a new australian (all the while keeping my eye on my second lamington).

my aunt’s best friend died on sunday. she lived a couple of streets away from my aunt, and we saw her every now and again when we went up that way. she wasn’t ill, and she wasn’t that old. 56, according to the news report.

a 56-year old cherrybrook woman died after losing control of her blue toyota tarago van on the golden highway at dunedoo about 2.30pm.

at that time, we were in chatswood, just finishing up a lunch of shanghainese dumplings and garlicky eggplant, and trading tales with my cousins about our assorted ailments (me: a hurty sternum; my cousins: a current cold and a recent kidney infection). my aunt was reaching into her handbag for a small foil packet of hard candy made up with mysterious chinese herbs. she gave then to me, and said they would be good for my cough; it had made hers much better.

meanwhile, the van had come off the road, and had flipped and rolled, several times, and had come to rest on its roof. the five passengers managed to free themselves, but my aunt’s friend in the driver’s seat was trapped in the wreckage.

the news report mentioned the other passengers: a female with broken bones, two men aged 58 and 27, a 24-year-old woman, another woman whose age was unknown…

you couldn’t assume that the men were her husband and her son, and the first woman her sister, and younger woman her daughter. the third woman was her other sister, who had only last month been in an induced coma overseas, from a lung infection, and who had miraculously recovered, and come to australia for a recuperative holiday.

you wouldn’t know that the woman trapped in the car had been a nurse, and an artist, a painter with a studio in her backyard. she could whip up a batch of pumpkin scones just like that, and once, when she somehow coaxed the kid away for an afternoon, she whipped up a tray of pink cupcakes, from a packet mix, but still. that afternoon, the kid returned with take-home cupcakes, a case of lovely waxy crayons, a sketchbook, and a pair of enormous sparkly fairy wings. on her fridge door, this woman displayed a picture of a mermaid that the kid had drawn. the last time i saw her, almost six months ago, was across a grimy laminate table, over bowls of mediocre phở delivered by suitably surly waiters.

she didn’t make it out of the van. she died while the emergency crew tried to save her. it’s strange: i didn’t really know her that well, but i feel the break in my periphery.

it’s beginning to look a lot like xmas! there’s a dark cherry mocha frappucino awaiting me a starbucks, but now that starbuckss are few and far-between, i made do yesterday with the festive cookies ‘n’ christmas beverage at gloria jeans.

[ it pained me to order it -- i had to stop speaking halfway through and check the signboard to see that it really was called "cookies. and. christmas". ]

but it didn’t hurt to drink it. it was mildly chocolatey, and not overly minty, and if that doesn’t seem too exciting (it wasn’t), well! the self-serve sprinkles at the condiment bar will surely do you in.

here are some other exciting things i’ve found lately:

sweet william not nuts chocolate bar
i remember being told about dairy-free sweet william chocolate a few years ago by this vegan girl i knew. because i’m not vegan, or lactose intolerant, i did not think to venture down that route.

but! a new variety i stumbled upon at banana joes last week compelled me to put one in my basket. “not nuts!” it proclaims on the wrapper, for those allergic to peanuts as well as dairy. or for those, like me, who do not care for peanuts in their chocolate. instead, it is packed full of whole roasted soy beans. hurrah! the crunchy, beany little nuggets are a treat indeed, and surprisingly, so is the chocolate: smooth and creamy (though a little too sweet), and devoid of any of that weird soy flavour you get in regular non-asian soy milk products.

how do they do it? amazing!

also…

coca cola lip balm
i really do like coca cola, but i really have to be in the mood to drink it. i have to crave it, actually, and i give in to that craving two, maybe three times a year. oh, to feel that caustic fizz work its way down my throat is a wonderful thing.

the bumper pack i bought had regular coke lip balm, vanilla coke lip balm, and a liquid lip gloss that rolls on via an enormous silver ball bearing. it tastes and smells just like the real thing! and i don’t have to actually drink any of that crap! i am extremely happy about this great development in lip balm – junk food cross promotion. do not think i have not considered applying it over my regular cherry lip balm for a walk down cherry coke lane.

i resisted — so far — the fanta pack, which included a stick each of orange, strawberry and grape. perhaps i could just buy a grape one; grape fanta is so hard to come by these days.

- – -

bet you didn’t know i felt so strongly about coke!

what better time to finally address that meme i got tagged with the other day. ok, fine, two weeks ago. i am very bad with memes. but twopeople tagged me for this one, so it must be important.

so. the rules of the game:
• link to the person who tagged you
• post the rules on the blog
• write six random things about yourself
• tag six people at the end of your post
• let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog
• let the tagger know when your entry is up

that is a lot of rules, so i’m only following half of them. the first half. told you i was bad with memes! also, i think you get quite a lot of random things about me in the day-to-day running of this blog — i really like broccoli, for example, and “america’s next top model” — so i’m really scraping the barrel here.

1. i really like coca cola

2. i eat floor food
sure, it depends on the food, and the floor; i won’t eat food off a wet or grimy floor, even if it’s picked up quickly. but the five-second rule is fairly elastic around here. once, at the national art gallery cafe, a fat artichoke shot out of my sandwich when i took a bite out of the other end. i waited until i had finished the whole sandwich, and then i retrieved the artichoke from under my chair where it had rolled, on carpet, and i ate it, after checking for hairs.

3. i eat expired food
i am right now eating a bag of japanese milk-tea-flavoured corn snacks, best before date: 07.02.23. they have a pleasant, sweet, milky-tea flavour, and are only slightly stale… a bit like those flushable corn-based packing peanuts (it’s true, i nibbled one the other day to see if they were the disintegratable flushable kind).

4. i remove the pegs from the clothes line while bringing in the washing
i caught the tail end of this debate in the herald’s column 8 section earlier in the week. apparently such people are deemed to have some sort of obsessive-compulsive affliction. but really, how can you put out new laundry when the lines are littered with randomly placed pegs? you’d have to hold the damp piece of clothing bunched up in one hand while you claw at the pegs to release them before clipping them back on. you’d be unable to flick out the twisted wet bundles to rid them of their wrinkles. you’d… ahem. wait ’til you find out i’ve also been known to match the colours of the pegs to the colour of the clothes. and hangers, let’s not forget hangers.

5. that guy known as “the boy” moved back in
it’s neither an overly good nor bad thing — maybe it’s both, and maybe they cancel each other out — but i thought it might be useful to note, in the interest of narrative.

6. i am horribly shy and retiring
but i’ve met some great people through this blog. come say hello if you see me in the street… unless, um, you’re a scary stalker type. then yes, just walk on by.

i was alarmed when, at the very beginning of october, i went into a department store, and discovered that the halls had already been decked in boughs of holly, tinsel, feathers and a heavenly host of other shiny baubles. the beginning! of october! it’s madness!

but now that it is the beginning of november, i feel barely a qualm about plugging this crafty little tome that i designed for kids craft weekly.

“christmas craft” is full of ideas for such xmassy essentials as cards, ornaments, decorations, and advent calenders. you don’t even need a kid to partake of all this festive fun! after all, you can’t be on the internet all the time, can you?

but you: you can download this bounty of handmade goodness for 5 bucks (7.50 in australian money, pending the plummeting dollar) and relive the glory days when your fingers could do more than double-click.

i’d been thinking about painting my bedroom green for several years now. many, many years actually. behold this fine mosaic of paint chips i have amassed: one of these is for ralph lauren paint in a lovely shade of dogwood, and another is from crayola (“green thumb”, it’s called; i also have a little square of warm, sunny yellow called “macaroni and cheese”). both these tchotchkes i procured on my last trip to new york, which would make this quest at least… um… six years old.

it wasn’t so much a fear of commitment that stood in my way. ok, so it was a little. but it was more that i was afraid my room would end up looking like a hospital recovery ward. calm, soothing, healing green and all. and yet, this impulse kept rearing its head, year after year.

a few weeks ago, i finally gave in to it. there was a lot of masking tape involved, and scuffmarks on the ceiling from the ladder i bought when i used to live somewhere with high ceilings. there was a surprise appraisal from the team of actual, professional painters who, coincidentally, were repainting the outside of my building. there was a chocolate croissant for sustenance, and an early-to-mid-’90s australian rock playlist (cue: tumbleweed, you am i, spiderbait), and then…

green.

i like it in the morning, mossy in the natural light. not so much at night, with the energy-saving lightbulb casting a disturbing radioactive hue. i think i might have to revert to a good old-fashioned tungsten wire.

last week, i finally, finally put the cake on the wall. if i wake up on my left side, it’s the first thing i see. because of course, it’s never too early for cake!